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Ashlyn Chak

Trying international foods can be a bit of a minefield for those who follow a gluten-free diet. Take Chinese cuisines, for example; wheat is used in everyday ingredients such as soy sauce, black vinegar and dumpling wrappers.
Marina Lai-Lentz, a 35-year-old British-Chinese restaurateur in London, believes that dietary restrictions should not deter people from enjoying great gastronomy.
Earlier this year, she not only developed a fully gluten-free dim sum menu, she also revamped half of an industrial kitchen to ensure that diners with coeliac disease – where your immune system attacks your body when you eat gluten – can safely enjoy her food.
This unusual commitment comes from Lai-Lentz’s maternal instincts, as her son was diagnosed with coeliac disease in the spring of 2026.
The conclusion came almost as a relief after years of worrying about her child’s previously undiagnosed health condition. Upon learning the news, “I was most worried about Chinese food,” she says with a laugh.
“That’s where my brain went straight away, because I grew up around so much Chinese food. Culturally, our love language is food. As a diaspora parent, I am already away from my culture. I carry so much more responsibility to give my child the culture, a big part of which is to sit down and eat dim sum together.”

As the second-generation owner of Golden Phoenix, a restaurant in London’s Chinatown, she promptly told her chefs about her child’s coeliac diagnosis, and they started making gluten-free dishes for him.
“Normally, when he has gluten, he gets a tummy ache, has diarrhoea and is drowsy for a long time,” Lai-Lentz notes. “None of that happened with the food from the restaurant, and I was like, ‘OK, amazing. We are so lucky.’”
What went into creating a gluten-free menu?
While some Chinese dishes, such as sweet and sour chicken, can easily be made gluten-free, Lai-Lentz says dim sum is particularly challenging because of the textures created by wheat flours and starches.
Preventing cross-contact or cross-contamination is also difficult in most Chinese kitchens that handle ingredients containing gluten.
Golden Phoenix, however, happens to be one of the largest restaurants in London’s Chinatown. “It has such a big kitchen that we were able to gut half of it and make it completely gluten-free,” Lai-Lentz says. “The risk is at its absolute lowest.”
Unlike many other venues, the restaurant also has its own roast meats chef, who became crucial to the development of the gluten-free menu. “Because we do everything in-house, we can now change the marinade to coconut aminos and tamari instead of soy sauce, which is part of how we can offer such an extensive menu,” she says.
On June 8, 2026, she launched a gluten-free menu at Golden Phoenix; currently, they have 33 gluten-free Cantonese dishes. The dim sum options are: crystal prawn dumplings (har gow), spinach and scallop dumplings, carrot and corn “silk thread” vegetarian dumplings, pan-fried chicken and ginger gyozas (fried dumplings), prawn cheung fun and plain cheung fun (steamed rice rolls).

Lai-Lentz says that, in replacing wheat starch with a combination of potato starch, sweet potato starch and tapioca, it can cost “three times as much” to make dumpling wrappers, but she chooses to charge regular London dim sum prices – from £5.90 (US$7.80) to £7.50 – to protect coeliac diners from an unfair penalty.
“Is it fair?” she asks. “We don’t believe that people should pay more just because they are unfortunate enough to have [coeliac disease or gluten allergy].
“Yes, it is true that the ingredients are more expensive and so much harder to source because they are not readily available and commonly used, but as a business, we have to find other ways to balance that. We won’t punish our gluten-free customers for it.”
What else is on the menu?
The new special menu also includes other Cantonese and Hong Kong dishes, such as roast duck, crispy pork belly, fried three stuffed treasures (tofu, aubergine and green pepper), two fried noodles (ho fun) with beef and spicy black bean sauce or mixed vegetables, and salted and pepper crispy tofu and baby squid. There are even dessert options: mango pudding with evaporated milk, mango and grapefruit tapioca pearl soup and taro and sweet potato tapioca pearl soup.
The menu specifies that the restaurant has “taken extensive precautions to minimise the risk of cross-contamination”, including but not limited to: a dedicated storage area, preparation and cooking area and separate steaming baskets, woks, chopping boards, refrigerators, freezers and even utensils. The staff are also trained on allergen handling.
Lai-Lentz hopes to add to Golden Phoenix’s gluten-free menu every few months, with the ultimate aim of matching the regular menu’s 250 dishes as closely as possible.
During the trial week, she welcomed symptomatic coeliacs, who left the restaurant satisfied and healthy, which gave her the confidence to serve it to more diners.

Because coeliac disease is invisible and can lead to social isolation, Lai-Lentz has received some “really emotional messages” from people – some who have not had a proper dim sum experience in decades, as well as people who never had the opportunity to try Chinese food because they were diagnosed as a child.
But perhaps the true testament to her gluten-free menu lies in her role as a mother of three, one of whom suffers from coeliac disease.
“I would never make something and sell it if I wouldn’t feed it to my kids,” she says. “That has been my ethic from day one.”
From takeover to today
When she took over the restaurant from her mother in 2022 – after a two-year interim period – one of the first things she did was replace artificial food colouring with natural dyes made from foods like spinach, pumpkin and purple cabbage.
“When my son was diagnosed, I knew I had to be confident in my food so that any time he wants to go to the restaurant, we can just go,” she says. “If I can’t feed it to my son, I can’t feed it to you. You can say that it started from selfish reasons – I wanted a place that we could just go and not have to call the day before.”
Despite her current dedication, Lai-Lentz actually never planned on taking over the family business. Her Hong Kong-born father, Winston Lai Kwok-hung, who opened the restaurant in 2014, was a hard-working immigrant parent who did not want his children to endure the gruelling restaurant trade.
“For him, it was like, ‘I’ve worked so hard. This was a means to an end. Go do something you enjoy; don’t put yourself through what I went through,’” Lai-Lentz says.
Lai immigrated to London in September 1986, at the age of 28, spending his early years living hand to mouth and working menial jobs to make ends meet, including peeling potatoes for fish and chips shops. He slowly worked his way up and, in 1990, became a manager at a Chinese restaurant.

Lai-Lentz calls him a “really observant and ambitious chatterbox” who learned first-hand how the industry functioned. Eventually, he saved enough to open his own restaurant in Chinatown in 1994. Over the next two and a half decades, he opened seven more restaurants, with Golden Phoenix as his final and most cherished venture.
Meanwhile, Lai-Lentz studied English literature and philosophy at the University of Nottingham. After graduation, she worked as a food show host in Shanghai and Luxembourg, as she remained “obsessed with food”.
Two years after her father’s death in November 2020, she realised she was more than a “foodie” – and she had an emotional attachment to the family business.
Her mother had taken over the business and made the difficult decision to close all but two of Winston’s eight restaurants.
“This was going to die out, and the legacy would end,” Lai-Lentz recalls thinking. “The staff had been with my dad for more than 20 years … I didn’t want it to end with me. I’d feel so bad.”
That sentimental moment was the reason she took over the restaurant in 2022, and it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. While her late father and second child never met – Wynston Lai-Lentz was born in July 2021 – Golden Phoenix has become a poetic link between the two.
“It feels like I was able to collaborate with my dad to help my son, because [by combining two restaurants] he built a foundation that by chance lent itself to us being able to convert the kitchens and evolve to fit this dietary requirement,” she says.
“Sometimes in quiet moments when I’m on my own at the restaurant, I think to myself: my dad will never meet my son, and I will never work with my dad, but this feels like we did it together.”
Golden Phoenix, 37-38 Gerrard Street, London, W1D 5QB, United Kingdom


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The gluten-free dim sum selection at London’s Golden Phoenix, where Marina Lai-Lentz is the second-generation owner. Photo: Marina Lai-Lentz

Marina Lai-Lentz and her son, Wynston, who was diagnosed with coeliac disease in the spring of 2026. Photo: Marina Lai-Lentz

Gluten-free dim sum at Golden Phoenix, in Chinatown, London. Photo: courtesy of Marina Lai-Lentz

Lai-Lentz outside Golden Phoenix in 2026. Photo: courtesy of Marina Lai-Lentz

Lai-Lentz‘s father, Winston Lai, in 1986, the year he arrived in London from Hong Kong. Photo: courtesy of Marina Lai-Lentz

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Food & Drink

A London restaurateur, driven by maternal instinct, created a gluten-free dim sum menu, ensuring coeliac diners can enjoy Chinese cuisine


A London restaurateur, driven by maternal instinct, created a gluten-free dim sum menu, ensuring coeliac diners can enjoy Chinese cuisine.


Gluten-free Chinese food? If you live with coeliac disease, you’ll love this dim sum menu

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A London restaurateur, driven by maternal instinct, created a gluten-free dim sum menu, ensuring coeliac diners can enjoy Chinese cuisine

A London restaurateur, driven by maternal instinct, created a gluten-free dim sum menu, ensuring coeliac diners can enjoy Chinese cuisine